In the Business Intelligence domain, reports are created in order to discover relationships between dimensions. One of the report creation needs is to easily identify ranges of values and assign a certain presentation characteristic to it. For example, users may want to see all Sales values above $200.000 highlighted in green to easily identify the products that sold the best.
In many definitions of ranges, it is easy for business users to make the mistake of overlapping ranges. For example, a business user may erroneously create a rule of “Sales>100,000 and SALES<120,000”. In these cases, a business intelligence system needs to solve any overlapping ranges by either asking the user to create correct rules, or to apply rules automatically which may result in a confusing solution for the user.
Also, when the user wants to create multiple ranges, the user needs to include the ranges in the right “order” by moving them Up or Down in a list of ranges.
In order to assist users to define ranges, some existing business intelligence tools use “from-to” text boxes such that the user can insert values. These text boxes however do not provide to the user any clear indication as to what the values exactly mean, i.e., it is not clear if a value is included in the range or excluded.
Some existing business intelligence tools use operators, e.g., like >, <, and >=. This approach leaves the business users to understand the exact definition of the operators and to prevent overlaps.
Some existing business intelligence tools use horizontal lines that allow users to insert a value in the “right” spot along the lines. This approach causes problems with screen real estate when users want to use multiple ranges. Also, it is still unclear of the exact definition of the ranges at the borders.
It is therefore desirable to provide a mechanism that allows users to define correct ranges easily without getting problems of overlapping of ranges.